Hello,

I have an exciting news for you. After learning and playing with Power BI for more than a year, I would love to share all this awesomeness with you on a play date. Of course, you don’t have to pack your sleeping bag and tooth brush. You can join me on this play date from the comfort of your couch and PJs. Stoked? Read on.

Introducing Data from Hell:

Watch out, its data from hell. In this new video series, we are going to examine some nutty, frustrating and fun data reshaping challenges and solve them using Excel. We will use Power Query, Formulas, VBA or other features as needed to free this data from damnation.

For our first installment, let’s reshape unevenly spaced list of values to a table.

Last week, we talked about how to copy and paste visible cells alone (ie exclude any filtered rows or hidden columns etc.) In the comments section many of you suggested two more ways to deal with this annoying problem. Let’s take a look them.

Here is something annoying with Excel.

Open any Excel file with few columns of data. Hide some of those columns (select the columns and press CTRL+0). Now, copy a few rows of data. Paste it else where. Excel will paste the values in hidden columns too. We thought Excel would omit the values in hidden columns.

What the filter Excel?!? I thought we were friends, but you annoy me with some of these quirks.

Game for some charting awesomeness?

Off late, I have been doing a lot of data analysis and visualization on performance ratings, salary hike, gender pay equality etc. Today let me share you an awesome way to visualize massive amounts of data.

Scenario: Your organization of 3,686 people recently went thru annual performance ratings & review process. At the end of it, everyone was offered some salary increase (from $0 to $24,000 per year). You have 7 business groups. How do you tell the story of all these salary hikes in one chart?

How about the one above?

Ready to know how to create this in Excel? Read on.

Yesterday we saw a beautiful example of panel charts with R. Today let me show you how to create the same (or even better) with Power BI & R. What you need: Power BI Desktop and R Raw data set – rem-data.csv Creating Panel Charts in Power BI with R Load CSV data in to […]

Recently, I had to make a bunch of panel charts. After wrangling with Excel (and a tiny bit of VBA) to create them, I wondered if we are suffering needlessly by being too loyal to Excel. I switched to R and could create these panel charts in almost no time (well, first I had to learn how to pivot the data using dplyr). Today, let me share the experience.